by Phil Klay
“SEALs.” Mason grunted. Everybody hated SEALs. The joke when the DEVGRU guys killed bin Laden was, Oh wow, after ten years of shooting every unarmed civilian in the room, the SEALs finally got the right guy.
“Yep,” Diego agreed. “Fuckin’ SEALs.” Bitching about the SEALs was good. He could see Mason nodding in agreement. Mason was the kind of guy who thought he knew better than everybody else how things should be done. He was too fastidious, too disciplined, too much a believer in the nobility of the mission for what was too often an ugly war. It shouldn’t be a reach to get him from thinking he knew better than the rest of the military to him doing something about it.
“Your girlfriend know you were using her?” Mason said.
“She knows every source got an angle. Shit, I told you she was smart.”
“Sure.”
“It gets better though,” Diego said, leaning in, breathing whiskey breath over Mason. “Now she knows the town, so when she hears about what happened, she heads back to cover the funeral. And there were some very interesting people at that funeral.”
“You sent your girlfriend into the middle of a Taliban civil war just to generate targets.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Diego said. “I let her know there might be a story there. Her choice.” Then, in a mock-heroic voice: “She is her own sovereign individual.” He gestured grandly with his whiskey. “We are all our own, sovereign individuals.”
Mason smiled. “Yeah . . . I’m a soldier. And a dad. And a husband. I haven’t been my own sovereign individual in decades.”
“There’s got to be someplace everybody’s ignoring. Something going on where we’re not involved but maybe should know more about.”
And then Mason was quiet for a moment, and Diego let him be quiet. The wall behind them showed a cartoon artist’s version of Italy, with goofy-looking Roman statues and cathedrals and leaning towers and men in striped pants offering pizzas. Should he say anything more? No . . . Mason had to work it through on his own. There was something on his mind. Diego could see that. Of course there would be.
“Send her to Norte de Santander,” Mason said.
And then he told him why.
3
The night before she left Lisette realized, rather pleasantly, that she wanted to sleep with Diego. There was nothing else for her to do. She’d packed. She’d prepped to the extent that prepping was possible. And the next morning, early, she was getting on a plane and leaving any complications behind. But Diego was, in some ways, a delicate man. Prone to sudden spikes of pride. And he’d given her what she asked for, a decent lead. A possible story. Not so he could sleep with her. If he thought that’s what it was, if he thought she thought that’s what it was, the tenuous thread between them would snap. So fucking Diego was probably not on the table.
Unless, of course, she could offer him something less ephemeral than a good-bye fuck. She had come to like Medellín as she had not Bogotá, that city in the flat bottom of a bowl beneath the mountains, filled with buildings sticking out of the earth like used cigarette butts. Medellín was a wilder, more organic thing, with its neighborhoods in the draws of steep mountainside. During the day, the buildings crawled upward into the lush green slopes, and at night the city lights poured down from the ridgelines like glowing rivers. The people were more hospitable, more blunt, and more honest. Even the politicians seemed to lie more honestly. It was a good place to be, and a place she’d like to return to once she was done in Norte de Santander. Could she promise Diego that? That she’d return? Yes, she thought she could. So maybe, just maybe, fucking Diego was on the table after all.
For dinner, he did what he called an “asado,” which as far as she could tell was just throwing steaks on an all-wood fire. He worked the grill while she relaxed, took in the view, drank beer, chatted lazily, and eyed him in a way she could tell made him uncomfortable. He kept looking back at her, the furtive look you give a suspicious stranger trailing behind you in a bad neighborhood.
He was a large man with a handsome face. Thick hair just starting to gray. Brown eyes and stupid tattoos. Skulls and daggers and U.S. flags. There was nothing chiseled or sculpted about his body, she knew that. His torso was thick and had all the definition of a sandbag. And he was hairy. But he was strong and solid and, at times, startlingly tender. She watched the ripple of muscles in his forearm as he flipped the steaks. He flashed another furtive glance back and she grinned at him, this object suddenly come into her possession and which she was, for now, pleased with. He turned back to his very manly grilling of the steaks, and she let her laughter break out again, the laugh only slightly nervous.
“This is so nice,” she said. And she could see him visibly relax. He nodded yes, so pleased that she was pleased.
She wasn’t sure where the strength of her desire came from. Maybe from the pleasure of having a new direction, possibly even a purpose. Maybe from the length of her last dry spell. Maybe, even, from a book. A professor at the University of Antioquia in Medellín had suggested she read what he assured her was one of the finest poets to come out of Norte de Santander, Gaitán Durán, and so she’d picked him up only to find that he hadn’t written much of anything useful about the department she was heading to, but had written a ton about sex and death, about the implacable march through history toward our deaths that can only be demolished by eroticism and poetry, because all is death or love, because love is the fiesta in which we most remember death, and so on. It was good stuff, somewhat out of step with her more mundane and less self-important take on the act, but it’d probably had an effect. So maybe that was it. Or maybe it was just one of those things. A desire that struck rarely but powerfully, she didn’t know where from, mixing with loneliness and swelling, intensifying, doubling, quintupling. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, this kind of desire, and maybe it should be distrusted, but as the light darkened and the flames from the grill provided an ever greater proportion of the light on their faces, the surrounding night covering and enveloping them, she became sure. She wanted him.
He took the steaks from the grill and wrapped them in tinfoil.
“We should let the meat rest a bit,” he said.
“Come here.” In her nervousness, she barked the words out like a command. He turned, surprised.
“You gonna ask me nicely?”
Now she overcompensated, attempting a girlish playfulness. “No,” she said. “I’m not nice.” And when he just stared at her, confused, she repeated, “Come here.”
He walked over, his face wary. When did she get so bad at this?
There were lights far down the slope of the mountain, maybe from boats on the waters of the Embalsa de Fe, the lights below brighter than the stars above. And then he was standing over her as she sat low in an absurdly flimsy plastic chair, but he just stood there, waiting. She felt a surge of anger, at herself, at him for being so passive, so stupidly inert. And what did he want from her anyway? For a moment, she considered turning away, telling him, Forget it. Forget I said anything. But that would be a failure of some kind. Perhaps a failure of nerve. Her hands were slightly shaky but she affected a pose of confidence and started unbuttoning her skirt as he stood there, doing nothing, nothing, not even a change of expression. And she watched him watching her, her nervousness turning to mortification with him looming there, mute, a silent silhouette above her, and she reached and grabbed his hand, and then she was guiding his hand down and he was letting her, and she let out a breath, and he stooped, then knelt before her, the skin of his hand chilled from the air but then warm and damp against her and he knew what to do, kneeling, as he guided his fingers inside her underwear and then inside her, entering her with his index and then middle finger as well, stroking upward and then, after a slight nod from her, pulling her underwear down, kneeling down deeper, bringing his face to her and then his tongue.
She looked at the fire and at the lights below, and she breathed deep
ly, and made little sounds not so much of pleasure but of deep relief, tension flowing outward, into the darkness, and she felt very relaxed, very much in the right country, at the right time, in the right place, doing the right thing.
After she was done, he kept rubbing her, playful, sending shocks of pleasure that became almost painful and then, finally, were painful, and she pushed his hands away, and they were both breathing heavily. She considered reciprocating but then thought, No, let him wait. And she said, simply, “Let’s eat.”
They unwrapped the steaks and sat down and, at first, ate in silence. It was only after a few minutes that Diego asked her, “Honestly, Liz, what are you doing here?” He spread his hands out and gestured to the valley below.
“I burned out.” It felt shameful to say it out loud.
Diego smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “But here you are, back in the saddle again.”
Lisette laughed. “Why’d you leave the army? And don’t say ‘money.’”
He leaned back and eyed her carefully. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was the wrong call. I was done with army bullshit.”
“It’s strange to see you someplace that’s not Afghanistan,” she said. “Doesn’t feel real.”
He nodded.
“But it’s nice.”
They chatted a little more of this and that. Nothing important. They finished their steaks, which were bloody. She didn’t normally eat her steaks that way but it tasted good. And with that taste on her lips, she let him lead her inside to his bed.
* * *
• • •
Two days later, Lisette was sitting in a beat-up pale blue van with no air-conditioning, no shocks, and hardly any stuffing left in the seat cushions, heading up Ruta Nacional 70. It was hot. Thirty degrees Celsius and climbing. She was sitting shotgun. In the middle section of the van, scrunching next to the boxes of gear she’d brought with her, was Juan Agudelo, a middle-aged professor of law at Nacional with a crooked nose and a mostly bald head. Crammed in the back were the two students Agudelo had brought along with him, a pair of eager young things who were there to cart gear, type off transcripts, and generally handle bitch work. And next to Lisette, driving, was the foundation’s regional director, Luisa Porras Sánchez. She was a tough, heavy, square-shaped woman with dark hair, a strong jaw, and utter contempt for journalists.
“It was not my decision to bring you here,” Luisa had told her flatly when she arrived. “Bogotá insisted.” Local players in the peace movement sometimes had a bit of resentment against the Bogotá-based national players, the people with university degrees, European funding, and plenty of abstract notions about conflict resolution and transitional justice. “And, of course, we’re responsible for feeding you,” Luisa had continued. “Are you going to write something worth the cost of what you eat?”
As shtick we nt, it was pretty good.
They emerged from the city into flat plains of sparse grass and grubby trees with half the leaves missing from their branches. Ahead of them were brown, ugly mountains.
It had been easier finding an NGO operating in the region than Lisette thought it would be. A friend of Bob’s had tipped her off to a New York hedge fund manager who, inspired by a complex mix of conservative politics and liberal sympathies with the human rights movement, was funding the documentation of human rights abuses within FARC territory and surrounding areas. She’d reached out to New York first and received an enthusiastic response—“Try to get your article out before the peace vote”—which had then made connecting with the local actors easy. They knew the money they were getting from abroad came with implicit demands.
“How does Norte de Santander . . .” Lisette wasn’t exactly sure how to say what she wanted to ask, or if Luisa might find it offensive. “Are there more problems here, in Norte de Santander . . .”
“Poverty here has, for my whole life, been consistently above the national average,” Agudelo’s matter-of-fact voice came from behind. “The government has a metric—the BNU—Basic Needs Unsatisfied. In Santander, it’s about twenty percent of the population. Here, in Norte de Santander, about thirty.”
They approached a river, and the colors of the landscape became richer, more lovely.
“Because . . . the violence?”
“Our manufacturing is weak. Only about half of children are enrolled in school. But, yes, the violence makes it worse. Criminals raise the costs of legitimate business, push people into the illegal economy, which makes them dependent on the gangs.”
“Or the guerrilla.”
“The guerrilla have lower taxes,” Luisa chimed in, “so they are bad, but not as bad as the gangs.”
“We’re going to a town . . . the control is by Los Mil Jesúses, yes?”
This, Luisa didn’t like. She eyed Agudelo, who shrugged.
“How do you know them?” Luisa asked.
“They’re interesting.”
“No. These groups are not interesting.”
Luisa fixed her eyes on the road. A new tension hung in the already suffocating air of the van.
“Lina said you were writing an article about the foundation,” Luisa said. “Is that true?”
“I am interested in your group.”
“My group.” Luisa shook her head, then pulled over to the side of the road and slowed the van to a stop. She turned to fix her glare on Lisette. “Listen to me. You are here because national wants you here. Because publicity for us can drive money, and we are always starved. Starved. Not because interesting groups like Los Mil Jesúses need more attention. If you’re not going to write about us, get out.”
The students in the backseat had their mouths open. Lisette sighed and glanced at Agudelo, who merely raised his eyebrows, as if to say, It’s a good point, why don’t you respond?
“Okay,” she said. “I already told you. I am interested in your group.”
Luisa stared at Lisette, then shifted the van into gear and pulled back onto the road. They drove for a long time in silence. One of the students fell asleep. Lisette stared out the window. A brown river slouched beside the road—thick green vegetation to their right, brown and desiccated trees to their left.
There was little talk for much of the rest of the trip. Lisette closed her eyes and tried to sleep, waking only as they approached La Vigia, the town that Diego had assured her the U.S. military was unusually interested in, and which had experienced a power shuffle after the Colombians, using U.S. tech and tactics, had killed some high-ranking muckety-muck in one of the bigger Colombian drug gangs. If Diego was right and it was indeed a place where the second- and third-order consequences of the use of force were playing out in ways that made people in Bogotá nervous, then it was as good a place as any.
The outskirts of La Vigia were simple houses, earthen construction haphazardly placed that slowly yielded to a more orderly grid pattern of roads lined by white cement houses with metal bars on every door and window. There was road construction ahead, limiting the road to one lane, and Luisa slowed to a stop behind a line of cars and trucks. As far as characters went, Luisa wasn’t a bad one, and maybe there would be a role for her in whatever story Lisette ended up telling. Surely worth profiling, if she could get on her good side. Which she was certain she could. The ones who were the most theatrical about how tough they were usually cracked easy.
Luisa, noticing Lisette’s eyes on her, gave one loud sniff. “Violent people are boring people.” She said it as if responding to something Lisette had said. “Broken children who can only do one thing. Crap-asses who could never work a real job. Set them on good land, already tilled and planted, they’d sit around, stroke their guns, and cry as they starved.”
The line of cars moved forward and then stopped in front of a shuttered store on the side of the road. Without the breeze from the windows, the van quickly became unbearable.
“We have a bakery here,
” Luisa said. “A bakery is a good place to train them to be human beings. You have to get up early. Work with your hands, but also talk with real people. Customers. Some townspeople don’t go to our bakery. There’s a lot of stigma against ex-combatants. But what are we going to do? The paramilitaries killed my father, now I give them jobs baking bread.”
That was interesting. Lisette made a note to run that down. A woman who worked to rehabilitate the kinds of combatants who had killed her father held a natural appeal. Add that to her “I’m such a tough cookie” swagger . . . She’d come off well on the page.
“Do you rehabilitate guerrilla also?”
“More, now. It is harder. This was a paramilitary town. One ex-guerrillero who went through our program, oh, five years ago? He was killed. Of course, we don’t know why, but there is more hatred against the guerrilla here and now we have more of them and it makes it difficult.”
“How many get other jobs outside of the bakery?”
“Real jobs?” Luisa said. “Hard to say. We don’t let them stay at the bakery too long. They have to go out, find other employment. And it’s hard, because the economy here is not very good, there is a lot of poverty. And there’s always more ex-combatants than we have positions. We try. Some businesses help, some don’t. The success rate is not that good. But we have to grow a human being out of a pile of shit, so what do you expect?”
Lisette laughed at that, and heard Agudelo let out a sigh from the backseat. The construction workers started waving more cars through and Luisa started the car again, air moving into the vehicle.
“You know,” Lisette said, “you should sell me your work. Not tell me it doesn’t always work.”
Luisa smiled. A real smile. She knew she was being complimented.
“In Bogotá, they can afford lies. Here, we cannot.”
* * *
• • •